How do I revert a big change in CVS?

Question

One of my colleagues has totally messed up the contents of a directory in our main CVS repository. I need to just revert the whole module to the state it was in at the end of l

Answer 1

You could look into cvsps. Google it.

Also, with quilt (or Andrew Morton's patchscripts, which is what quilt started out as) and cvsps, a very close approximation of changesets can be had.

see http://geocities.com/smcameron/cvs_changesets.html

Answer 2

I believe your second command should also be a checkout, rather than an update. I can't justify this with logic, since there is no logic in the world of CVS, but it has worked for me. Try this:

cvs co -P modulename
cvs co -P -jHEAD -jMAIN:2008-12-30 modulename

If you're reverting a branch other than HEAD, e.g. X, pass the -rX argument in both commands:

cvs co -P -rX modulename
cvs co -P -rX -jHEAD -jMAIN:2008-12-30 modulename

Answer 3

Big problem, don't have full answer, just a tip on your scripting to deal with spaces in file names.

Instead of

find ... | xargs tar c - | ...

try putting

find ... | perl -e '@names = <>;' -e 'chomp @names;' -e 'system( "tar", "c", "-", @names);' | ...

that way, your archive creation (or similar operations) won't suffer from spaces in the names, the shell argv parsing gets skipped before tar is called.

One more thing, on the off chance it actually works: if there is a CVS to SVN utility, use it (I am assuming such a utility would pull deleted files from the "CVS attic"), and if it saves each moment in time as a project level checkpoint (since SVN does that, unlike CVS), use SVN to fetch the right moment in time. Lot of ifs...

Answer 4

According to http://www.astro.ku.dk/~aake/MHD/docs/CVS.html, the following is what you need:

cvs update -D "30 Dec 2008 23:59"